I own several, actually. As well as thesauruses… from small pocket ones to a honkin’ yuuuuge one. Seriously, flipping them open is often my first go-to when I need to brainstorm or just find some creative inspiration.
I believe I was required to buy one for an English class many a year ago, because colleges are very efficient at fucking you out of money. It’s prolly under some piece of furniture 'round here, possibly propping it up.
I also own several (everything from pocket dictionary to unabridged plus medical, science, Oxford English) along with thesauri, and use them frequently.
@spiralroad
I had one of those OEDs that came with a magnifying glass once. Wonder what happened to it?
The super thin paper and the magnifying glass made it a PITA to browse in.
Tolkien worked on the OED.
Amid all the publicity surrounding this year’s release of the film of J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Fellowship of the Ring, it has occasionally been mentioned that Tolkien was an English professor. What is rather less well known is that in 1919 and 1920, at the very start of his career, Tolkien worked on the staff of the Oxford English Dictionary; he later said of this time that he “learned more in those two years than in any other equal period of my life”.
An expanded history is here, along with images on Tolkien’s handwritten notes on various words. He was assigned words of particularly difficult etymologies.
I dictionaries! I have a giant dictionary in two volumes, a paperback Oxford English, and others. Really useful for Scrabble, or when composing alliteration.
@droopus You know, this is not the first time I’ve heard this (about gullible not being in the printed dictionary). Knowing that I had one handy, and being sure that I’d pointed out this myth to someone else, I grabbed The American College Dictionary, published in 1947, and updated every year or so, until 1963 (I’m sure it was updated later, of course, but that’s what my copy says).
Yep, there it is, right on page 539, second column, third entry down. It follows gullet, and is followed, in turn, by Gulliver’s Travels.
I’ve heard this same urban legend about other words, but it seems that “gullible” is the most common choice.
@droopus - I remember chasing birds with a saltshaker when I was 4 or 5 yrs old. My parents told me I could catch birds by shaking salt on their tails. Gullible.
@Shrdlu I have to point this out because I have no idea weather or not you read the definition of gullible while you had the dictionary open, but i believe the falls under the heading of gullible, or alternately they " made you look "
@jqubed Gulliver’s Travels is in the dictionary because someone might want to look it up? Here’s the entry:
a social and political satire (1726) by Swift, narrating the voyages of Lemuel Gulliver to four imaginary regions: Lilliput, Brobdingnag, Laputa, and the land of the Houyhnhnms.
It says nothing else, other than that. Guinevere is also on that page (but in the first column) if it gives you any comfort. In earlier days, even dictionaries were more interesting.
I Modestly Propose that the names of many well-known characters, works of art, people, places, and institutions, and other well-known proper names, shall be included some vintage dictionaries.
How nice, that I do not have to time travel to accomplish this minor gesture, as more literate and accomplished persons than I already took care of this matter. A simple pleasure is offered to the modern reader of these fortunate books.
This topic led to me investigate my dictionary collection. The big-ass Random House Unabridged I had since grade school seems to have been lost in one of my many moves. I still have a big-ass Websters and some English-German and English-Chinese dictionaries. I’ve used the foreign language dictionaries in the past few years but the English dictionary has only been used as a weight to flatten things in the last ten or twenty years. Sad.
@huja
I’ve got my beloved big-ass Random House Unabridged right next to me at all times. Well, when I’m at this computer. It’s not a traveling companion, though it has come on a few vacations.
Your current Websters is doing what it does best–flattening things. Find another Random House today! Ebay
As long as I wax pedantic, I might as well contribute. I love books, especially the older ones. I have several dictionaries, including The American College Dictionary (one of my favorites), and some helpful language dictionaries (French/English, German/English, and several Latin/English). I used to have a lot more dictionaries, but I reduced my library by 3/4 (or more) when I retired, and kept just a few.
@Shrdlu
Do you remember the ones in the school libraries and public libraries on the dictionary stands? Was that Merriam-Webster, or some other publisher?
When in grade school I used to treasure that these, when on their stands, tended to fall open on the horse entry, which was about midway in pages, and which had a picture; as I was so into horses.
I probably still have a few dictionaries to my name, but I suspect they’re all still at my parents’s house. In most cases the convenience of online dictionaries, easily accessible from my phone, far outweigh the conveniences of a print dictionary. I’m not saying I’d turn down an Oxford English Dictionary, but I’d probably prefer a subscription.
I owned a very nice boxed dictionary thesaurus set for about 30 years, but with the advent of the Internet I hadn’t used them in a long time. They ended up in a donation box a few years ago. I had to check it carefully first, though. A roommate who was paid monthly used to give me three $100 bills on payday, asking me to give him one per week so he’d have money through the month. After he moved out, he told me he used to search the house top to bottom for his money. I told him I hid the bills in the dictionary under “money” knowing there was no risk of him cracking a book.
I own many. One is actually over a century old. Not in the best condition, but it’s become a family heirloom. It is also the largest dictionary I have seen in person. As punishment for bad grades, I had to copy a page by hand, then my mom would quiz me about it afterward. I hated it at the time, but it was a great tool for building vocabulary, and a strong incentive to do better in school. Better than writing the same sentence, over and over.
@simplersimon When we were little, at the dinner table my dad would make some outrageous claim, like Africa was attached to Antarctica, and after dinner it was a race among us kids to the World Book encyclopedia to prove him wrong. It was a great teaching tool. We couldn’t afford Britannica, but my parents bought World Book in some volume-a-month deal. The encyclopedia was loved in our house as the Bible and dictionary are loved in some other homes. I read the whole thing a couple of times. Decades later, on the rare occasion of seeing an okapi, the World Book picture and encyclopedia entry pop clearly into my head, along with how fascinated I was as a kid with this exotic looking beast.
@moondrake We had a set of Funk & Wagnalls encyclopedia. My folks (maybe grandparents?) must have found them used somewhere; we couldn’t afford Britannica OR World Book
@moondrake
I wish that we had a set of encyclopedias when I was an avid reader. Now that the Internet has made knowledge easily accessible, it has made me more reluctant to relish in it.
@jqubed
Don’t get me wrong, that does happen to me, but for the amount of information available, I don’t feel as excited to learn as I have in the past with limited resources. I do enjoy it when I get to do it, but it doesn’t happen as often as it should.
@DVDBZN
The trick of figuring out, with the information overload, what’s a near-optimal “information and reflection path” for a task, for a day, for a life, is an interesting one. Of course, for the long view, there is no single reducible optimal path. Doesn’t work like that for our species.
I’m terrible at it, but I have a lot of fun anyway.
As much as I love dead tree books, dictionaries are best suited to a form more easily updated (at least any one that claims to be comprehensive) because language is a living thing. Print dictionaries are good historical resources but to keep up with actual USAGE is near impossible for them. Especially with the proofing required. By the time a full “updated” print version is available, it’s already out-of-date.
I still have 2 copies of the Webster’s Collegiate from 1941 as well as an Oxford around some place. There’s just something about the printed page that is re-assuring in it’s permanence.
Hell, I am the guy that still gets the newspaper delivered to my house (when the carrier decides to get his/her ass out of bed to actually throw them…)
We used to use it to play a game with the kids (both now over 30) we called “fictionary”. You opened up the dictionary to a random page, and picked a word, (only the person that picked the word knew the correct definition unless one of the other players already knew the word as part of their vocabulary). Then each person wrote a definition of the word on a slip of paper (remember writing…?) and after each one was read out loud you got a point for picking the correct definition and a point for each time your definition was chosen by one of the other players.
Seems like there was a board game that was developed that had similar traits…
I hadn’t heard of your family’s game. THat’s a really good one.
I told this story somewhere else here.
My younger brother is a history buff and is a fanatic reader for work and pleasure. He and his wife have three boys. Often they cooked dinner for their kids’ friends.
The price of dinner was often a history quiz. When it was just family, the quizzes could be tough. When the neighborhood was visiting, they simplified things.
Sample Q&A for visitors:
Who was President during WWII?
Uh… Kennedy?
Who were our allies during WWII? (usually phrased as “What countries were on our side during WWII?” since the word “allies” was a bit challenging to some of the kids.)
England and Japan?
What happened in December 1941 at Pearl Harbor in Hawaii, and what countries were involved?
<long pause> Oh. I guess Japan wasn’t on our side.
@moondrake
My brother still plays that game with all of us in our Family Fantasy Football League group texting setup.
Bro will inevitably make some bizarre connection between a coaching strategy and the history of the Thirty Years War or compare a given NFL game and Punic ambitions or something. Fortunately most of us can kinda sorta keep up for a while.
Except for me. Whatever the historical oddity he offers up, even if I have to fake it, or hit Wikipedia fast on the downlow, I just up the torment level. After a while it’s just he and I still trying to top each other, while everyone else in the group texts back and forth evil and dark comments about the degenerative effects of lifelong sibling rivalry.
PS He actually know a lot of history. I don’t, but I do have an odd collection of useless facts and am quick w Wikipedia.
Can’t let him just win, you know.
Interesting sibling rivalry fact.
When the three of us were growing up, we played a lot of Monopoly. Youngest bro (the history buff above) was enough younger that his sweet, generous, kind, honorable, honest older siblings could get away with “reinterpreting the rules” to a degree.
So one day a friend of younger bro was over, the two were playing Monopoly. They were arguing about the rules. About passing GO and getting $200, which the friend insisted was one of the rules of monopoly.
Suddenly younger bro’s eyes widened and he said, "I bet you’re right! I bet you do get $200 when you pass GO!.
The rest of us - including my parents - were across room and we could see all this.
Only we we all pretty much rolling on the floor with laughter. My parents had not known us older kids were such cheaters, and were trying to be stern and lecture us about fairness and honor and honesty. But they couldn’t stop laughing long enough to do it.
Since that day, younger bro has tended to check out for himself whatever his older siblings tell him.
@chienfou - You’re thinking of the board game “Balderdash”, I believe. Great game!
There’s also a weekly NPR program called “Says You” where they play a similar game on the air. Not as much fun as actually playing with friends, but the panel is relatively entertaining.
I have a copy of Webster’s abridged dictionary I got back in 1992 that was signed by King Louis XVI of France. Since then, I steal a copy of either Webster’s or Oxford from whatever office I leave.
When you steal the dictionaries, do you steal only the ones signed by dead European royalty from centuries ago? Or will just any dictionary do for the purpose of stealing?
If I am on my desktop and working offline because WiFi is down, I will reach for the dictionary on the nearby shelf. I can find it more quickly than by using my phone.
However, if for some reason I were sitting on the sofa and just needed to know how to spell a word, than the phone would be an option.
Including French and Spanish dictionaries, I have about a half-dozen. I mostly use the English ones to create passwords - a pair of D12s and a really good dictionary can make seriously excellent passwords.
I own several, actually. As well as thesauruses… from small pocket ones to a honkin’ yuuuuge one. Seriously, flipping them open is often my first go-to when I need to brainstorm or just find some creative inspiration.
@haydesigner
I also like the physical ones. Nice to just wander around in.
@haydesigner:
“Thesauruses”? “Thesauri”? “Thesaurii”? “Thesaurpodes”?
@ZenAtWork
Googli thouest!
I believe I was required to buy one for an English class many a year ago, because colleges are very efficient at fucking you out of money. It’s prolly under some piece of furniture 'round here, possibly propping it up.
I own one pocket dictionary (used once) and one giant unabridged dictionary (used never)
I also own several (everything from pocket dictionary to unabridged plus medical, science, Oxford English) along with thesauri, and use them frequently.
@spiralroad
I had one of those OEDs that came with a magnifying glass once. Wonder what happened to it?
The super thin paper and the magnifying glass made it a PITA to browse in.
Tolkien worked on the OED.
An expanded history is here, along with images on Tolkien’s handwritten notes on various words. He was assigned words of particularly difficult etymologies.
http://public.oed.com/history-of-the-oed/newsletter-archive/jrr-tolkien-and-the-oed/
@f00l That was the “compact” edition from the 80s - 4 pages shrunk down to one page, right, with a drawer on top of the case for the magnifying glass?
@droopus
Yeah. Super super thin paper also. Hard to use, but I treasured it.
I
dictionaries! I have a giant dictionary in two volumes, a paperback Oxford English, and others. Really useful for Scrabble, or when composing alliteration.
Did you know the word “gullible” is not in printed dictionaries? True story.
@droopus You know, this is not the first time I’ve heard this (about gullible not being in the printed dictionary). Knowing that I had one handy, and being sure that I’d pointed out this myth to someone else, I grabbed The American College Dictionary, published in 1947, and updated every year or so, until 1963 (I’m sure it was updated later, of course, but that’s what my copy says).
Yep, there it is, right on page 539, second column, third entry down. It follows gullet, and is followed, in turn, by Gulliver’s Travels.
I’ve heard this same urban legend about other words, but it seems that “gullible” is the most common choice.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gullibility
@droopus
Take this problem to Helen Waite. I’m sure that’ll fix it.
@droopus - I remember chasing birds with a saltshaker when I was 4 or 5 yrs old. My parents told me I could catch birds by shaking salt on their tails. Gullible.
@KDemo
Are you volunteering?
I won’t go anywhere near her.
@f00l - Sorry, edited my comment.
@KDemo
sigh. i forgive you. even tho it hurts me to do it.
sigh.
@f00l
@Shrdlu … and thereby, making his point about gullibility…
@Shrdlu I have to point this out because I have no idea weather or not you read the definition of gullible while you had the dictionary open, but i believe the falls under the heading of gullible, or alternately they " made you look "
@chienfou
Might not have been falling for a joke.
Might have been bait …
@Hellboundmeh
Trust me. @shrdlu knows.
@Shrdlu
Did you know the word “joke” is not in printed dictionaries?
True story.
@Shrdlu My compliments.
@Shrdlu Wait, why is Gulliver’s Travels in the dictionary?
@jqubed Gulliver’s Travels is in the dictionary because someone might want to look it up? Here’s the entry:
a social and political satire (1726) by Swift, narrating the voyages of Lemuel Gulliver to four imaginary regions: Lilliput, Brobdingnag, Laputa, and the land of the Houyhnhnms.
It says nothing else, other than that. Guinevere is also on that page (but in the first column) if it gives you any comfort. In earlier days, even dictionaries were more interesting.
@Shrdlu
I Modestly Propose that the names of many well-known characters, works of art, people, places, and institutions, and other well-known proper names, shall be included some vintage dictionaries.
How nice, that I do not have to time travel to accomplish this minor gesture, as more literate and accomplished persons than I already took care of this matter.
A simple pleasure is offered to the modern reader of these fortunate books.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Modest_Proposal
https://www.owleyes.org/text/modest-proposal
https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/1080
This topic led to me investigate my dictionary collection. The big-ass Random House Unabridged I had since grade school seems to have been lost in one of my many moves. I still have a big-ass Websters and some English-German and English-Chinese dictionaries. I’ve used the foreign language dictionaries in the past few years but the English dictionary has only been used as a weight to flatten things in the last ten or twenty years. Sad.
@huja
I’ve got my beloved big-ass Random House Unabridged right next to me at all times. Well, when I’m at this computer. It’s not a traveling companion, though it has come on a few vacations.
Your current Websters is doing what it does best–flattening things. Find another Random House today!
Ebay
As long as I wax pedantic, I might as well contribute. I love books, especially the older ones. I have several dictionaries, including The American College Dictionary (one of my favorites), and some helpful language dictionaries (French/English, German/English, and several Latin/English). I used to have a lot more dictionaries, but I reduced my library by 3/4 (or more) when I retired, and kept just a few.
@Shrdlu
Do you remember the ones in the school libraries and public libraries on the dictionary stands? Was that Merriam-Webster, or some other publisher?
When in grade school I used to treasure that these, when on their stands, tended to fall open on the horse entry, which was about midway in pages, and which had a picture; as I was so into horses.
I probably still have a few dictionaries to my name, but I suspect they’re all still at my parents’s house. In most cases the convenience of online dictionaries, easily accessible from my phone, far outweigh the conveniences of a print dictionary. I’m not saying I’d turn down an Oxford English Dictionary, but I’d probably prefer a subscription.
I owned a very nice boxed dictionary thesaurus set for about 30 years, but with the advent of the Internet I hadn’t used them in a long time. They ended up in a donation box a few years ago. I had to check it carefully first, though. A roommate who was paid monthly used to give me three $100 bills on payday, asking me to give him one per week so he’d have money through the month. After he moved out, he told me he used to search the house top to bottom for his money. I told him I hid the bills in the dictionary under “money” knowing there was no risk of him cracking a book.
@moondrake
Hmmm.
Know what I’m checking out when i visit your place.
I own many. One is actually over a century old. Not in the best condition, but it’s become a family heirloom. It is also the largest dictionary I have seen in person. As punishment for bad grades, I had to copy a page by hand, then my mom would quiz me about it afterward. I hated it at the time, but it was a great tool for building vocabulary, and a strong incentive to do better in school. Better than writing the same sentence, over and over.
@simplersimon When we were little, at the dinner table my dad would make some outrageous claim, like Africa was attached to Antarctica, and after dinner it was a race among us kids to the World Book encyclopedia to prove him wrong. It was a great teaching tool. We couldn’t afford Britannica, but my parents bought World Book in some volume-a-month deal. The encyclopedia was loved in our house as the Bible and dictionary are loved in some other homes. I read the whole thing a couple of times. Decades later, on the rare occasion of seeing an okapi, the World Book picture and encyclopedia entry pop clearly into my head, along with how fascinated I was as a kid with this exotic looking beast.
@moondrake We had a set of Funk & Wagnalls encyclopedia. My folks (maybe grandparents?) must have found them used somewhere; we couldn’t afford Britannica OR World Book
@moondrake
I wish that we had a set of encyclopedias when I was an avid reader. Now that the Internet has made knowledge easily accessible, it has made me more reluctant to relish in it.
@DVDBZN Are you sure? That sounds like something someone would say if they’ve never taken a dive down a wiki wormhole.
@jqubed
Don’t get me wrong, that does happen to me, but for the amount of information available, I don’t feel as excited to learn as I have in the past with limited resources. I do enjoy it when I get to do it, but it doesn’t happen as often as it should.
@DVDBZN
The trick of figuring out, with the information overload, what’s a near-optimal “information and reflection path” for a task, for a day, for a life, is an interesting one. Of course, for the long view, there is no single reducible optimal path. Doesn’t work like that for our species.
I’m terrible at it, but I have a lot of fun anyway.
As much as I love dead tree books, dictionaries are best suited to a form more easily updated (at least any one that claims to be comprehensive) because language is a living thing. Print dictionaries are good historical resources but to keep up with actual USAGE is near impossible for them. Especially with the proofing required. By the time a full “updated” print version is available, it’s already out-of-date.
I still have 2 copies of the Webster’s Collegiate from 1941 as well as an Oxford around some place. There’s just something about the printed page that is re-assuring in it’s permanence.
Hell, I am the guy that still gets the newspaper delivered to my house (when the carrier decides to get his/her ass out of bed to actually throw them…)
We used to use it to play a game with the kids (both now over 30) we called “fictionary”. You opened up the dictionary to a random page, and picked a word, (only the person that picked the word knew the correct definition unless one of the other players already knew the word as part of their vocabulary). Then each person wrote a definition of the word on a slip of paper (remember writing…?) and after each one was read out loud you got a point for picking the correct definition and a point for each time your definition was chosen by one of the other players.
Seems like there was a board game that was developed that had similar traits…
@chienfou
I hadn’t heard of your family’s game. THat’s a really good one.
I told this story somewhere else here.
My younger brother is a history buff and is a fanatic reader for work and pleasure. He and his wife have three boys. Often they cooked dinner for their kids’ friends.
The price of dinner was often a history quiz. When it was just family, the quizzes could be tough. When the neighborhood was visiting, they simplified things.
Sample Q&A for visitors:
Who was President during WWII?
Uh… Kennedy?
Who were our allies during WWII? (usually phrased as “What countries were on our side during WWII?” since the word “allies” was a bit challenging to some of the kids.)
England and Japan?
What happened in December 1941 at Pearl Harbor in Hawaii, and what countries were involved?
<long pause> Oh. I guess Japan wasn’t on our side.
@chienfou Sounds like Dixit. Your family’s version was a great game.
@moondrake
My brother still plays that game with all of us in our Family Fantasy Football League group texting setup.
Bro will inevitably make some bizarre connection between a coaching strategy and the history of the Thirty Years War or compare a given NFL game and Punic ambitions or something. Fortunately most of us can kinda sorta keep up for a while.
Except for me. Whatever the historical oddity he offers up, even if I have to fake it, or hit Wikipedia fast on the downlow, I just up the torment level. After a while it’s just he and I still trying to top each other, while everyone else in the group texts back and forth evil and dark comments about the degenerative effects of lifelong sibling rivalry.
PS He actually know a lot of history. I don’t, but I do have an odd collection of useless facts and am quick w Wikipedia.
Can’t let him just win, you know.
Interesting sibling rivalry fact.
When the three of us were growing up, we played a lot of Monopoly. Youngest bro (the history buff above) was enough younger that his sweet, generous, kind, honorable, honest older siblings could get away with “reinterpreting the rules” to a degree.
So one day a friend of younger bro was over, the two were playing Monopoly. They were arguing about the rules. About passing GO and getting $200, which the friend insisted was one of the rules of monopoly.
Suddenly younger bro’s eyes widened and he said, "I bet you’re right! I bet you do get $200 when you pass GO!.
The rest of us - including my parents - were across room and we could see all this.
Only we we all pretty much rolling on the floor with laughter. My parents had not known us older kids were such cheaters, and were trying to be stern and lecture us about fairness and honor and honesty. But they couldn’t stop laughing long enough to do it.
Since that day, younger bro has tended to check out for himself whatever his older siblings tell him.
@chienfou - You’re thinking of the board game “Balderdash”, I believe. Great game!
There’s also a weekly NPR program called “Says You” where they play a similar game on the air. Not as much fun as actually playing with friends, but the panel is relatively entertaining.
Got a couple hanging around. Mostly just for when we play Scrabble.
I have a very old dictionary signed by Hellen Keller.
@Jerrold
Now that’s a great one.
I collect dictionaries the older the better. I love to look at how the meaning of some words change over time.
@don
How old is th oldest?
I have a copy of Webster’s abridged dictionary I got back in 1992 that was signed by King Louis XVI of France. Since then, I steal a copy of either Webster’s or Oxford from whatever office I leave.
@evilmonkey65
When you steal the dictionaries, do you steal only the ones signed by dead European royalty from centuries ago? Or will just any dictionary do for the purpose of stealing?
I borrowed one when Vampire Weekend was making a big deal about the Oxford Comma. I didn’t find it informational, so I turned to Wikipedia.
@jmendenhall I don’t think a dictionary would address grammar; a style guide might serve you better.
If I am on my desktop and working offline because WiFi is down, I will reach for the dictionary on the nearby shelf. I can find it more quickly than by using my phone.
However, if for some reason I were sitting on the sofa and just needed to know how to spell a word, than the phone would be an option.
@DrWorm For me the phone is much faster. I just say “OK Google define obstreperous”. Or “OK Google spell obstreperous”.
Including French and Spanish dictionaries, I have about a half-dozen. I mostly use the English ones to create passwords - a pair of D12s and a really good dictionary can make seriously excellent passwords.
I said no. I looked at my bookshelves today and realized I have “Dictionary Of Superstitions.” I don’t think that counts though.